GrokBlok

Braintree Payment Solutions is a leading provider of end-to-end electronic payment products and services. Braintree processes all forms of electronic payment transactions – credit, debit, electronic check, and electronic funds transfer. The company offers simplified PCI Compliance and credit card storage solutions, risk and fraud management, ecommerce solutions, and rate management. We’re changing the industry one customer at a time and would invite you to experience the difference.

Officially, my role is “Community Developer”, which sounds a bit ambiguous, but it’s actually a perfect title for what I’m going to be doing. I’m in charge of all things developer at Braintree, so I’m focused on Developing the Community and also Developing for the Community. In short, you can check out my work on the Braintree Community Developer Site which will include a blog, support forums, api docs, code examples, and all the information that you’ll need to easily integrate payment processing into your own applications.

The site is currently a little sparse on content, but we’re adding more everyday and I’m completely focused on making it the definitive place for information on credit card processing, payment gateways, and integration issues for developers in all communities. Initially, we’re focusing on Ruby on Rails developers, but we welcome developers from all languages and frameworks. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please contact me at developer@getbraintree.com.

Needless to say, I’m very excited to be a part of such a great company and I’m looking forward to helping people navigate through a very complicated industry.

For those of you in the Columbus area, I’ll be speaking at the Columbus Ruby Brigade meeting this evening regarding Rails 2.0. This will be a high-level talk around some of the new things and some of the deprecated behaviours in everyone’s favorite web framework.

Today marks the last day that I’ll be working at Cardinal. I’m extremely excited to be working for a new company, GoNowDo. We’re going to be working on solving some interesting problems in the online travel industry. Stay tuned for more information.

Thanks to everyone at Cardinal!

I am no longer an innocent bystander to the world of open source projects. I’ve had my very first patch applied to a code base. While working on a tiny Rails project, I used Rick Olsen’s restful_authentication plugin/generator. The tests failed immediately due a change in the api for assert_difference. I made the changes, and submitted a patch to Rick, and he applied it last night, along with a couple of other small changes.

I’ve been wanting to start getting involved with more patching, but just haven’t had the opportunity. I even set-up a specific workspace on my laptop just for things that I’m going to be patching, that way I can keep it separate from my own projects.

How exciting!

It’s been several weeks ago, but my company, Cardinal Health paid for my entry in the 2007 Race for the Cure in Columbus, Ohio. More than 37,000 people showed up to run in this worthy cause. While I didn’t raise as much money as I would have liked to, you can still donate here. It was really heart wrenching to see so many people who were running “In Memory Of” Grandma Jones, Aunt Doris, or Mother. Please consider giving some money to a group that helps to eradicate this terrible disease. Let me state it like this, we can put a man on the moon and bring him home safely, but we can’t find a cure for a disease that takes wives, mothers, daughters, aunts, and grandmas? We need a Jack Kennedy style mandate to have this disease beaten in the next 10 years. With your donations, that could help.

This was my first 5k, and the first time that I’ve ever ran more than 3 miles without stopping. I was very pleased with my results. I finished 5333 out of almost 7000 people with a time of 40:10 (although I didn’t actually cross the start line at the beginning until 2:30 into the race). That may not seem like much, except for the fact that I was probably one of the heaviest people there. For those that don’t know me by sight, there’s not a lot of difference, visually between myself and the average NFL offensive lineman, 6’4” and between 310 and 340 lbs.

Some of you might know that I recently started working at Cardinal Health, which may or may not seem relevant until you realize that Cardinal is #19 on the Fortune 500. Taking that in conjunction with the fact that I worked at JPMorgan Chase & Co. for 5 years and they are listed at #11 on the Fortune 500 and I feel comfortable in saying that I know there is a spot in all enterprises for Ruby and Rails. I’m finding that decision makers are more open to open source, more open to going outside the enterprise comfort zone, and more open to selecting the solution is is done the quickest, with the most business value, and meets their needs the most.

So, what am I doing? In short, I’m helping technology leaderships make the best investment decisions, while becoming an industry leader, not an industry follower. I’m proving to them that you don’t needs teams of consultants or a pricey support contract to business value out of the data that your organization holds. I’m proving that Ruby belongs.

Rails at JPMorganChase

At JPMC, I led the team that created the 1st fully-supported and fully-funded Rails application inside the bank. Of course, things got complicated because we had to work with other technologies and people who weren’t receptive to Ruby, but that’s the real trick anyways, isn’t it? In 3 short months, we went from discussion and a single SVN commit to an application with a user community in excess of 10,000 people. We were hooked into the global authentication system, and living like good citizens of the enterprise application community. The benefit is that now people can more easily get access to the revenue generating systems and spend less time just sitting at their desk when they start new (which was the basic premise of the application that we created).

I’m a little unfamiliar with the current status of the application, but the current project lead, John Andrews has taken the ball and run with it. The user community continues to grow and the application continues to morph and integrate and become fully assimilated within the JPMC universe. One of JPMC Retail banks lead architects, who is a Smalltalk developer at heart is very interested in Rails and has been suggesting it to other teams in order to help him make a strategic decision. It could perhaps become as ubiquitous to them as Java or .NET. The part that I’m most proud of is that 1 year ago, there were no full-time Ruby/Rails jobs at JPMC, today there are 3, and that’s a great thing for the community.

Ruby at CardinalHealth

At Cardinal, I’m doing something that I think is even more edge-leading and innovative. I’m in the process of deploying several small Camping apps, which work together to create a dashboard of information for IT leadership to make investment decisions. It’s the simplest possible thing that could be done. I take several ruby scripts that use active record and I pull data, manipulate it into something a little more friendly and then load it into an SQLite database that my applications use. I’m not tied to the system of records, but since these data mover scripts are called from cron, they’ll give a very accurate depiction of the environment. I plan on blogging about this idea further.

What is the effect? In short, it’s been marvelous. I’ve done in several weeks something that probably would have taken much longer to do in other frameworks. It’s exactly what the decision makers needed at the time, no more, no less. The first taste has been enjoyed, and now they want more. Ruby has been established as a tool that gets things done. This will place dynamic languages into conversations in team AD team meetings where previously they would not have been. I’m really looking forward to extending on the work that I’ve started there.

Exhortations and Encouragement

If you are looking to try to get Ruby or Rails in the door at your job, take heart, there is a bright future on the horizon. Eyes are opening, discussions are being had, and Ruby is finding itself in some of the most unlikely places. What can you do? You can look for opportunities to present themselves. Start small, write ruby scripts instead of bash scripts for some automated tasks. Use ruby to parse files that get data moved from one system to another. Prove to your boss, and their boss that not only is Ruby an incredibly beautiful and capable language, but it’s also one that will provide them the quickest business value in their toolbox.

Why does it seem like these people are always so uptight about you installing anything on “their” machines? I realize that the majority of their day is spent trying to help the most computer illiterate people figure out why IE won’t do this or that, but I promise you that I will never call them for support. If they hate their jobs so much, just go ahead and become a developer, or system administrator. I’m not saying that they aren’t valuable and necessary workers, but the future tells me that desktop support is a new entrant into “blue-collar” work.

I recently have attempted to get a desktop computer to go along with nice laptop in order to demo some things for my users internally. By their reaction, you would have thought that I was asking to setup a datacenter in the bathroom. I guess that’s what I get for being an outsider.

I just wanted to give a shoutout to Dan for his interview on Working with Rails. He finished 2nd in their Hackfest, and as a result, is going to RailsConf for free. Of course, my favorite part of the interview had to be the answer to the question about how Dan got involved with Rails:

When I started working for JPMorganChase I did web development in PHP. In the fall of 2005 Joshua Schairbaum, my colleague, started using Rails and really liked it. He encouraged me to check it out, and soon we were using Rails for all our small projects. After successful delivery of several small web apps, Josh was able to sell Rails to upper management, and we now use Rails for a very large access administration application.

The “sell” to upper management went pretty smoothly due to the fact that we were delivering, in no small part to Dan’s efforts. Neither he, nor I work at the monolithic bank anymore, but I think he’s going to be making some waves at Thoughtworks, just as I plan to do at my new employer.

I just want to say thanks, Dan! Also, in the interview, he mentions a plugin by our good friend, John X Andrews. I highly recommend that plugin for all your scoping needs.

I’m really not into any of the social aspects of the web at a macro-level. I’ve never been to MySpace, I don’t IM, it’s just not my thing. Recently, I’ve discovered LinkedIn, and I have to say that I really enjoy it. I’m not sure that I would ever use the site itself for a job search, but I would however use it to meet new people who I might be able to help in the future, and vice versa. One of the coolest features thus far is the ability to search my gmail contacts list and send invitations to my contacts asking them to connect with me.

Guy Kawasaki has written a great article about some of the benefits of using LinkedIn. One of the more compelling reasons that I think are increasing your visibility, but that also brings me to another problem. I know have profiles on LinkedIn, Technorati, WorkingWithRails, and …. am I missing any? I’m wishing there were a single This-Is-Me online identity manager for the web. Perhaps I just need to pick a horse and go with it.

You can find the article here: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/ten_ways_to_use.html

You can find my public profile here.

It’s really old news, but my coworker, Dan Manges and I were featured on the Official Ruby on Rails podcast. This was a great opportunity to showcase for the Rails community some of the cool things that we’re able to do inside the bank. You can download the interview directly from here.

Last Monday, Dan Manges and I gave a talk at the Columbus Ruby Brigade about some techniques for bringing Rails into the enterprise. I believe that there are 2 ways of doing this. The first is attempting to make Rails a little more “enterprisey”, and I don’t mean sacrificing a lot of the things that make Rails great, but modifying some of it’s behaviors, such as support for composite keys and that type of thing. Basically, all the things that Dave Thomas talked about at RailsConf this year. The second approach is a bit more subversive, and that is to make the enterprise environment a little more Rails-like. It’s culture changing, and that’s what we focus on. This is the approach that would appear to be favored by DHH. I think both ways are valid because they have the same ends, just different means. Each situation is different and this approach works for us at JPMorganChase. So without further ado, here are the slides from the presentation, and I hope to have a podcast of our presentation edited by this weekend.

UPDATE The podcast is now available.

• PowerPoint: crb-enterprise-rails.zip
• Podcast: crb-enterprise-rails-podcast.mp3

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

This message was posted by my company’s CTO this morning on the corporate internet, accessible to over 100,000 employees. The names and stats have been changed to protect the innocent.

We continue to see the four pillars – - client focus, speed, efficiency and delivery – - paying dividends in our organization.

Josh Schairbaum & Dan Manges engaged these precepts in their recent efforts on the IT web tools project for Production/ Operations and Risk Management. They have done an excellent job in delivering quality with speed.As a follow-up to their experience in developing the daily snapshot to our production and operations performance via the Production Site, they were asked to use their development skills to bring life to our Risk Management Agenda with core metrics. For the Risk challenge, Josh and Dan took the approach of “convention over configuration” to achieve speed in developing the web-based Risk Metrics Site with “Ruby on Rails” on a Linux Sever. Josh and Dan’s efforts tracked the amazing progress that the Risk management accomplished over the last 45 days.

Josh & Dan will continue their efforts through our web strategy in 2006; however, the biggest priority on their plate will be the Supersecret next application that is targeted for September 30, 2006. Great job to both teams!

Needless to say, I’m pretty pleased about the progress being made. Some of you might ask why the big deal about Linux? Well, it’s the only one in the environment. :) I also had another article posted on the intranet about how I keep my inbox clean. I promise to make another post sometime soon concerning our adventures with Rails.